Return to Oz

 

The Festive Season is a time for films on TV. One of the great holiday favourites is the classic fantasy, The Wizard of Oz; however it had a less famous sequel made in 1985 called Return to Oz. This second film is very different in many ways to the original. It is not a musical and has a much darker tone; in fact it has some horror elements. It has some excellent special effects. It is set a few months after the original, following Dorothy's return to Kansas from the Land of Oz. She is obsessed with her experience in the magical kingdom and badly misses the friends she made there, the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman and the Cowardly Lion. Her parents start to worry about Dorothy's mental health. They dismiss her ravings as hysteria and are concerned that she cannot forget what they believe was nothing but a hallucination when she received a head injury during the tornado. They decide to take her to a doctor specializing in electrical brain stimulation. For a brief period during the turn of the twentieth century, doctors believed EBS could cure mental illnesses. What it did instead was make the patients worse by causing brain damage, like it did to the Aston character in Harold Pinter's The Caretaker. The supposed hospital Dorothy is taken to looks like Dracula's castle and the matron wears a dark vampiric dress. The first two people she meets are a pair of porters pushing a trolley onto which she is secured with leather straps like a prisoner for execution. It's an extremely disturbing scene and obviously terrifying for Dorothy, who is played by a pre-teen Fairuza Balk, which is odd seeing as Judy Garland in the original is clearly a good few years older, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EXoqJKE6Eg. To cut a long story short, Dorothy escapes and ends up back in the Land of Oz.
 
As with The Wizard of Oz, a lot of Dorothy's experiences in Return to Oz, as well as the characters she interacts with, are seemingly connected to her original life in Kansas; and so the possibility is never eliminated that her adventure really is all just a dream, something purely internal to her imagination. She reaches the Emerald City to find it in ruins. It has been sacked by the evil "Nome King" and the protagonists from the original film have been imprisoned. The ruins of the city are patrolled by "the Wheelers", a group of strange four legged humanoids with wheels instead of feet. It is clear that these are based on the porters Dorothy encountered at the hospital. Their locomotion even makes the same squeaking sounds that the un-oiled wheels of the porters' trolley did; and they are played by the same actors, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WM0RFE3QGAU. Could this be an example I could add to my article Hospital Porters in the Media? In that case it is our strangest portrayal as all. We begin as ghoulish assistants in an electrical brain torturing facility and turn into freaky four-wheeled evil clowns. I'm not sure what the implication is.
See here for background: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2016/12/hospital-porters-in-media.html.